Dartmouth College has long had an unusual governance structure in which half of the seats on the school’s Board of Trustees are reserved for “alumni trustees,” who are democratically elected by their fellow alumni. For much of the school’s history, when there was an alumni-trustee vacancy on the board, the remaining trustees would handpick a replacement candidate, who typically ran unopposed; the alumni association “election” was all but a formality.

This all changed in 2004, when Silicon Valley pioneer and Dartmouth alum TJ Rodgers (disclosure: a client of mine) gained enough signatures to get on the ballot, financed his own campaign, ran against the establishment-favored candidate, and, remarkably, won. Rodgers’s platform of improving undergraduate education and honoring students’ rights struck a nerve with his fellow alumni. Three other dissidents have since run on a similar platform in subsequent years, each time winning by a wide margin over the institutionally favored candidates.

Chair of the Board Ed Haldeman and his supporters have wielded the so-called trustees’ oath in an effort to muzzle the outspoken alumni trustees. One such alumni trustee, Professor Todd Zywicki of the George Mason University Law School, was publicly taken to task in a letter sent out to all alumni by the board, for delivering a speech in which he criticized Dartmouth’s leadership. Haldeman and his cohorts wrote in a statement on the board’s Web site that Zywicki “violated his responsibilities as a trustee of Dartmouth College, which includes acting in the best overall interests of Dartmouth and representing Dartmouth positively in words and deeds.” Similarly, the board has criticized Rodgers for sitting for news media interviews and discussing Dartmouth with considerable frankness.

The issue at Dartmouth appears to be whether a trustee, elected by alumni, does his duty when he offers constructive criticism of the university, or whether he must toe the company line, speak nothing but praise of the institution and its governance, and never hurt the financial statement. Stay tuned on this one.

Alumnus interruptus Rather than take pride in the bi-monthly’s stellar 108-year-old reputation, university administrators effectively declared war on Harvard magazine earlier this year when they brought out an in-house competitor.

2010 Muzzle Awards on campus Harvard and Yale universities felt the sting of the global economic collapse firsthand in 2009, as the endowments of these stalwart New England Ivy League members dropped by nearly a third. The schools didn’t fare much better in the free marketplace of ideas, either.

Beautiful disaster What we think of as “progress” — urban development, industrialization — has been proceeding at a rapid rate in China over the past decade, with significant environmental and human consequences.

Karma chameleon “Kesa” is the term for the traditional, oblong prayer robes worn by Buddhist monks in Japan — and this spiritually rich garment is the subject of Betsy Sterling Benjamin’s “A Sense of Place, an Artist's Tribute to the Seven Continents,” which opens at the Peabody Essex Museum on December 16.

Say it loud Unrest is in the crisp fall air as Election Day 2006 rolls around, and examples of artists who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore abound.

War paint There’s no shortage of photographic images of the war in Iraq — live footage on TV, front-page news photos, streaming video on-line.

Wild things One hundred corrugated cardboard monkeys hanging from trapezes greet visitors to “Going Ape: Confronting Animals in Contemporary Art,” which opens at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park on September 2.

Acquiring minds Given that virtually every activity in our lives is experienced through purchases, the exhibition’s focus on branding is sure to resonate with those of us facing post-holiday bills.